I have completed racking and upgrading my old faithful synology 5 bay unit (now out to pasture and retirement after 13 years) with a terramaster u8-423 (I could have gotten the u8 with the 10gbps, but didn't ordered this one by mistake). I tried the terramaster os, but it was buggy and slow. I then tried the whole zfs thing (with what used to be freenas), but the zfs complexity scared me and it crashed when I tried to write to it with < 20 gazilion gigs of ram. I did look at open media vault, but was intreagued with the whole 'unraid' thing.
- It DOES NOT use raid (which means it can be slower with magnetic disks)
- It uses "parity disks" dedicated as opposed to 'striping' data across all disks
- It does NOT detect bitrot (thats what underlying fs like btrfs can do)
- It has TONS and TONS of apps
Its fairly easy to install and RUNS OFF OF a SMALL USB Nubbin you can pluginto the terramaster so I don't waste a slot for it. It SHOULD NOT be exposed to the internet (assumes local security since no 2fa you don't want ot expose to the internet!)
It uses low power, and has 8 disk bays. It is a bit picky abour ram, but if you use the teamgroup ram it seems to work fine. It also supports 2.5gbps interfaces x 2. and has a GREAT community. I really like it and its a nice alternative to synology (which is great hardware but I don't like the push to use their ram and disks which are 2x as expensive for crappy drives).
I also upgraded my network with a new switch (its a really nice one, with a 10gbps uplink and 8x 2.5gbps with POE+) . I also got the ap25 from aruba (just beware if you dont' want cloud managed!). And my ooma telo finally died after NEARLY 20 years! (I got it in 2009!).
I also updated this website with a lot of new pieces of sofware, I just got tired of listing the new ones.